One must be the corpse
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | One must be the corpse |
| Country of production | GDR |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1978 |
| length | 84 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Iris Gusner |
| script | Iris Gusner |
| production | DEFA , KAG "Berlin" |
| music | Gerhard Rosenfeld |
| camera | Günter Jaeuthe |
| cut | Helga Krause |
| occupation | |
| |
One must be the body of a German crime film of the DEFA of Iris Gusner from the year 1978 . It is based on the crime novel of the same name by Gert Prokop .
action
A group of tourists from the GDR are vacationing on the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria. At the suggestion of Hans-Peter Maiendorff, who always takes photographs, they take part in an excursion to an island: the aging Magda and the single Pitty, the doctor couple Kunack, the crime fanatic and doctor Dr. Franz Enderlein and his wife Johanna, Dieter Gotthardt with his much younger wife Lisa, the young men Peter and Wolfgang and the couple Susanne and Hans, who only met on the trip. The tour guide is the Bulgarian Shana, boat guide Wassil only speaks Bulgarian.
Everyone spends a happy day on the island and retires to the hut on the island shortly before the planned departure back to the mainland. However, Shana announces to the group that the small ship's engine is broken. While Wassil begins the repairs and Egon Kunack calms his hysterical wife, Franz Enderlein suggests a detective game: One is the detective, the light is switched off in the hut and the “murderer” chosen by lot looks for a victim in the dark. Then the detective has to ask everyone, including the victim, where they have been, what they have heard or noticed, in order to find the perpetrator. The game is too silly for quiet Hans and he reads a book away from the crowd. The rest, however, will participate. The victim becomes Susanne, who, according to the game, is stabbed and then answers questions from the detective. However, everyone soon gets bored with the survey, and so Pitty and Maiendorff, among others, leave the hut. Susanne also leaves after answering all the questions in the game. At Shana's request, everyone gathers back in the hut, as the rocky island area can be dangerous for strangers, especially in the dark. However, Susanne is missing. Franz and Dieter find their motionless bodies floating in the water at the foot of a slope. Apparently it broke through a railing behind the hut and fell down the slope.
The news of Susanne's death causes unrest. Only Franz and Dieter suspect that it was murder because there was a splinter of wood in Susanne's skull wound, but the corresponding piece of wood from the railing is missing. It couldn't have fallen into the sea because the current would have driven it back to the beach. The footprints at the crash site also make it clear that Susanne must have stood with her back to the abyss when she fell. Franz and Dieter begin with a questioning of those present - ostensibly to gather facts for an upcoming questioning by the Bulgarian police. Various men swarmed around Susanne, including Egon, whom his morbidly jealous wife even called a murderer. Maiendorff saw him with Susanne while on vacation. He also overheard a conversation with Hans in which Susanne was already talking to him about having children. Vasily is considered suspicious because it could have been his canvas shoes, the prints of which were also found at the crash sites. Maiendorff was outside at night, as was Pitty.
When the ship is ready to sail again the next morning, Franz and Dieter report the suspicion of murder. Wassili and Wolfgang Altmann, who as the game's detective never left the hut to Susanne and is therefore considered unsuspecting, drive the corpse back to the mainland and notify the police. Meanwhile, the search for the killer on the island continues. Johanna and Lisa evaluate a notebook that Susanne kept in shorthand. There is talk of a longer relationship with a certain Jack, which ended briefly, but then started again and apparently wasn't over before the vacation and the new relationship with Hans. Meanwhile, Dieter and Franz find the part of the fence with which Susanne was killed. They question Hans, who reacts irritably and accuses Dieter of blindly trusting Franz, since only he saw the alleged wood splinter in Susanne's head wound. Dieter and Franz also have doubts. Then Johanna appears and solves the riddle: The Jack named in the notebook is - translated - none other than Hans.
Hans finally admits the murder. He had known Susanne for a year. During this time his fiancée was abroad on business and Hans began an affair with Susanne. Only shortly before his fiancée returned, Hans Susanne confessed that he would marry someone else in the summer. She promised him that he could come to her at any time and both continued the relationship. Susanne hoped to win Hans over to herself during this time. However, Hans decided on his fiancée. It was only when she had to go abroad for work and the summer vacation she had planned together in Bulgaria was canceled that Susanne suggested that she could travel with him. Through a friend in the travel agency, Susanne organized her trip so that she joined the group separately and met Hans for the first time at the airport for outsiders. When she pressured him to leave his fiancée while on vacation, Hans hit her with a club during an argument and she fell down the slope and died. If Susanne had not released him, and she had already sent photos that show both of them together during the vacation, home to separate Hans from his fiancée, Hans' professional career would have been jeopardized: He was supposed to take on a managerial position in one in September Commence plant in Calcutta and his fiancée was the daughter of his boss.
production
The corpse must be one is based on the eponymous crime novel by Gert Prokop, which was published in 1976. The shooting took place on location in Bulgaria and was supported by the Sofia feature film studio , Bojana Cinema Center.
The film premiered on February 2, 1978 in the Berlin cosmos and was released in GDR cinemas the following day. On November 13, 1979 it ran for the first time on DFF 2 on East German television.
criticism
The contemporary criticism was not particularly impressed: "In this film, every character has one or two conflict-related properties, which are then sometimes overburdened and played out while the viewer has long since 'processed' them", said Weltbühne in 1978. Renate Holland -Moritz wrote that the film does not show people, "there appear puppets that give a cliché idea".
For the film service , One must be the corpse was an "artistically unsatisfactory contemporary film, which is convincing neither as a crime film nor as a socially critical group analysis and only inaccurately processes its explosive material." Klaus Wischnewski called One must be the corpse a "very weak ... story in the Robe of the crime film ”.
“Unfortunately, the psychological chamber play turned out too clumsy. Conclusion: crime guessing game with cliché characters, ”wrote Cinema .
literature
- F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 130 .
Web links
- One must be the corpse in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The corpse has to be one at filmportal.de
- The corpse must be one at the DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ↑ See defa.de
- ↑ Peter Ahrens: Crime with claim . In: Weltbühne , No. 14, 1978.
- ^ Renate Holland-Moritz: cinema owl . In: Eulenspiegel , No. 11, 1978.
- ↑ The corpse must be one. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ^ Klaus Wischnewski: Dreamers and Ordinary People 1966 to 1979 . In: Ralf Schenk (Red.), Filmmuseum Potsdam (Hrsg.): The second life of the film city Babelsberg. DEFA feature films 1946–1992 . Henschel, Berlin 1994, p. 260.
- ↑ See cinema.de